Budgeting-Prices galore

 The ins and outs

So when budgeting is mentioned I know that a lot of people begin to sweat thinking about the amount of money that goes into things that life revolves around but when it comes to the world of video making and production it does still total a large amount of money but the structure is less intimidating than the source image used here.

So one of the biggest factors that influence the production of a professional film or video is the budget that's made and given. In essence what happens is when you get the base of your idea down and the research behind renting costs for equipment as well as actor costs and additional expenses like travel and food.

Now ordinarily when you receive a commission you might get the budget that they're willing to use that might be willing to be negotiated or that there's a small range available.

When it comes to the commission that I have received I got a rough amount of two budgets for the commission the first was the major budget for the actual production itself which stemmed between £8,000 to £20,000 which allowed for more flexibility when it came to going away and taking the feedback on the idea process itself.

So with this knowledge I went away and began to get more solid ideas on the budget itself, first thing I went away to figure out is how much the standard rate is for actor hire. So for the length of that the production would be one actor for the period of filming as well as the possibility of doing re-shoots and use of the contingency would be £2,251 so in my production I would need three actors meaning that the cost would come to £6,753 which would cover the time it would take to film and any need for contingencies or re-shoots that would take up time and would be blocked in just in case we need to use a back-up actor or a schedule changes.

Now armed with a baseline I could refer back to I could then begin to make arrangements for the cost of an editor against this as the total for the production and post post production of the video. An editors standard rate is around £25.40 an hour as is the suggested hourly rate as of the 1st of March 2021 so using this I managed to work out a total cost for the amount of time that I would need (in and around roughly four days or so) giving me a total of £2,438 for use in the Post production stage. Now this is a small price to pay to ensure that you make sure the client gets what they want.

Now onto the bread and butter of things that make a scene a scene apart from the human elements. The equipment you use for the making of the scene will determine anything from acting quality if your using props how the actors interact with them to the quality of the recording that you get from the materials themselves. In order to make sure that there was no panic when it comes to the use of cameras (excluding microphone attachment as we have supply enough for them) we looked into surpassing our roughly estimated time for recording to make sure that we successfully covered re-shoot and contingency time. From a company called HireCamera we were able to get a good deal of two cameras at an estimated rate of £960 for two cameras across two weeks. Below is a screenshot of said camera and the costings list for it. 

So for a grand total for the production budget is £10,151 which works right into the middle of what the client was hoping for when it came to the total cost of the production itself.

Now when it comes to getting it out we can use apps like Facebook or Instagram and advertise effectively for no cost it's about how the message has gotten out, promotions on Facebook cost roughly £0.79 which if used can be taken out of potential surplus of the production costs but then we come to the nitty gritty of things.

Below I have included a conversation between me and the client about budget for TV advertising:

Now in this we can see that the possibility of TV broadcast advertising on two majors networks has been mentioned NatGeo and Discovery so when exploring this you have to think about not only the costs but the payoff in the reach that it could have.

When researching we discovered that National Geographic has more viewers at 9.5 million people which when wanting to promote for a new product would make the most obvious choice as it gets the message out better and more than likely to get even more views and allow for more advertising on the social media end and vice-versa.

According to the website tvadvertising the rough cost of advertising on a Peak time slot is £10-£34 for a 30 second ad so for use across multiple slots at the top end of price in a minute ad would total ~£500 or around that area. This makes sure that we get the total amount of viewers that we can as we hit peak times and spread as much as we can and get people using Facebook and Instagram to see more of it and promotes one of the goals that the client wanted which is the discovery in its customers.

Well hopefully this gives you an overview of how finance and budgeting can influence a decision and how it impacts the choices made in a production and how much consideration is needed when making them.

Have a great day!